The Nobel Prize in Literature went on Thursday to Anne Carson, a Canadian poet who has spent four decades making ancient Greek texts feel like they were written last week. When the Swedish Academy reached her, she was in Iceland. By the academy’s account, she was “listening to the wind.”
Carson, 76, was honoured, in the academy’s words, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The prize is worth 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million, according to Reuters. It will be presented in Stockholm on 10 December.
A surprised laureate
Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, told a press conference that Carson “was very taken by surprise.” Carlberg said they had little time to talk.
Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV that she thought the people who made the decision were “all crazy,” Reuters reported. The University of Toronto, where she earned three degrees, said she told organisers it “seems a little insane.” She added that she had been sweeping her kitchen when the phone rang. According to the university, she called back only because her husband, Robert Currie, insisted.
The Globe and Mail asked her for a comment. She replied by email with one word in capitals: “YIKES!!”
What she writes
Carson is hard to file on a bookshop shelf. Her work moves between poetry, essay, fiction, dialogue and translation, often within a single book. She is also a professor of classics and has taught in the United States and Canada. The academy said she has written more than 20 books, some of which have been adapted for the stage.
Her 1986 debut, Eros the Bittersweet, examined desire in Greek literature. The Nobel biobibliography calls it the foundation of her later work. It builds on a Sappho word that describes love as pain and sweetness at once.
The book most often named as her finest is Autobiography of Red (1998), a novel in verse. It reimagines a fragmentary poem by Stesichorus about Herakles killing the winged red monster Geryon. In Carson’s version, Geryon is a gay teenager in the present day. The academy’s biography describes it as a work that brings the classical tradition into the present.
Other titles cited in coverage include:
- Men in the Off Hours, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001
- The Beauty of the Husband, a narrative poem about a marriage told in 29 tangos
- Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which sets Marilyn Monroe beside Helen of Troy
- Nox
The academy said her translations from classical Greek can be read as independent works in their own right. It also said almost all of her output sits where a philologist’s obsession with words meets a poet’s wish for new meaning. Carson herself has named the etymology of words as the starting point for her work.
Prizes and place
Carson has already collected a long list of honours. According to the Globe and Mail, they include the Lannan Literary Award for poetry, the T.S. Eliot Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the PEN/Nabokov Award. The Globe describes her as the third Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She was born in Toronto and has a home in Reykjavik, Iceland. Her interest in Greek began at secondary school, according to The National, where a Latin teacher taught her the language during lunch breaks.
Asked by Icelandic radio about writing, Carson said poetry may be more useful than prose right now because it is faster and brief. She was speaking, according to Reuters, about a world in which everyone is in a hurry. She also joked that she would “get a sticker on the front of my book.”
The academy’s choice rewards a writer whose books do not settle into one genre. Her readers have long treated that as a feature. Thursday’s announcement suggests the Swedish Academy does too.